EP 168: Futures Brought to Life - Tina Auer and Tim Boykett

 
 

A conversation with Tina Auer and Tim Boykett from the art collective, Times Up. We discuss what they learned and wrote about in their book called Futures Brought to Life - we are not futurists. Our discussion ranges over ideas like the Art of Hosting, Imagination as a muscle, Caring for the Future Futures is a Verb.

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

Notes

 

Transcript

Peter Hayward: How do we create conditions to best support people to engage with futures uncertainty and to find their agency? What would active members of an Art Collective find out about just doing that? And could they share what they have learned from their journey from immersive art installations to running futures exercises?

Tim Boykett: So this idea of that when we're inviting people to come and be part of a Futuring Exercise, we are hosting them in a number of different ways. So we're looking after them. We're caring for them. We're enabling them to play because if you're feeling exposed in some sense you're not going to play freely and be able to have a bunch of strange ideas.

So the Art of Hosting is about picking people up. Carrying them through this process, letting them feel comfortable, letting them feel open to a whole bunch of freedoms that they can have and discussions that they can have and leave that space in that time, feeling like they were, they did something that was unique.

Tina Auer: the whole sort of playfulness, not sure whether that could be called a practice or a method, but in all of our ideas and approaches, it's the playfulness. It's allowing or supporting people to not fear the future, I think it's also about developing some sort of a Lust auf Zukunft. It's a German expression here, a certain passion, a certain excitement towards futures instead of merely being completely paralyzed when thinking about it.

Peter Hayward: Those are my guests on Futurepod today. Tina Auer and Tim Boykett. The self-titled “talking heads” of an art collective called Time's Up. They joined me from their workshop in Austria.

 Welcome to Futurepod, Tina and Tim.

Tim Boykett: Welcome. Hello. Glad to be here.

Tina Auer: Yeah. Great being here. Thanks for inviting us.

Peter Hayward: Thanks very much. I'm glad to to get a chance to put you in the pod gallery of our guests. So we'll start with the origin question for Tina and Tim.

Tina Auer: I think we do an easy one, so to say, because we are not talking about the origin of ourselves as Tim and Tina. But I think we go into the origin of Time's Up. Time's Up is an Art Collective in the broadest sense. And Time's Up is interested in a very wide range of themes regarding Socio Political relevant topics. And we are trying to bridge art, technology, science, research, and even entertainment, as long as it doesn't bore us.

 Tim and myself, we are part of that collective since since it's beginning actually, and this will be the perspective we are taking on. We are members parts and maybe we are gear wheels of that collective. And we started off in the mid of 90s, so really in the previous century. There have been a few cornerstones which and still are of high relevance in all of our approaches, in our work and in our thinking. So what we do are situations and that that also leads to the subtitle of Time's Up. You're much better in saying that, Tim.

Tim Boykett: The Laboratory for the Composition of Experiential Situations, which has also been experimental situations at some times and various other versions of that.

Tina Auer: In general we are really keen setting up and staging environments which are tangible. So we have got a very strong preference for Materiality, for Physicality, and it's really like environments placed and staged in real space. One to one, and always allowing an audience to explore them; environments, which can be really experienced in a very playful way, without gamification though. So it is really what we do and who we are, those ones setting up and offering immersive environments. This is what we are aiming for in our artistic productions.

Tim Boykett: Yes, there's a lot of development yet having these immersive installations, and we did a whole bunch of work, maybe eight, nine years between the mid nineties into the two thousands with these sort of immersive media enriched environments. And we talked a lot about people like exploring them and anthropologist fellow Robert Fisher from Switzerland referred to the audience as Proto Scientists. We were inviting them to explore this world and to investigate the physics of the world in some sense. Like, how does this world work? What are the physical manipulations that we can do? How can we create sound? And we had fantastic experiences of building things. And then hearing all these strange sounds emerging and then finding that people had really dived into the possibilities of some of these interfaces and media environments and had created things that were for us completely unimaginable through these sort of iterative interactive processes.

So that was really nice. But after a while, we're doing a whole bunch of projects in this direction. We wanted to add this element of like Narrative of Humanity, of Humanness, to it. And so rather than just having these worlds to explore, we started creating these situations that were much more sort of narrative, story-driven and this idea of a “physical narrative” that you can actually explore a world by walking into it. And I think one of the approaches or one of the ideas that we use here is, it's not a physical narrative, is like when you visit somebody. You end up like , I come out to see you at your place and we come in and you say, "Hey, I need 10 minutes. I just need to run down to the post office and deliver this box before it's before the office closes. There's a cup of tea over there. There's a bookshelf over there. Make yourself at home." And then you run away. And by just sitting in your kitchen and looking around or in your office I or somebody can know a lot about who you are just by what you've got there. What’s on the table? What are the books that are lying around? What are the pictures on the wall? What are you showing? What are the photographs of family members or people you've met or important events in your life? Sam Gosling talks a lot about this as a way of knowing how people work this book Snoop, which is very creepy.

Tina Auer: I find it very creepy because I always have Tim in my head when I'm leaving the place here at Time’s Up-land and he probably just sneaks in my room and comes up with stories about me every single week in a different way. But anyway,

Tim Boykett: so yes, it sounds creepy. But yeah, that's why Gosling called his book Snoop, we think, because it is a little bit creepy. We got into this process of creating these stories rather than actually snooping into real people's worlds, actually creating offices and spaces that you could walk into as an audience member and you were invited to snoop around in them. And so there were these composed situations of somebody's workspace or playing space or whatever that was. People could get lost in them and explore what's going on and the sense that Robert Fisher was talking about our work as encouraging the audience to become Proto Scientists to investigate like the mechanics of these new worlds perhaps we can think about these sort of worlds as inviting an audience to be a Proto Detective. Who-dun-it? What's going on here? Why is there nobody here right now? Are they next door? Can we hear them speaking through the door? We've used those sort of techniques. Here's someone in the bath, on the telephone, talking to people. And that's part of the storyline, part of the narrative that we've created. There's this process of creating these worlds, inviting exploration, inviting people to make up the bits of the story that they can't see, and coming to various conclusions.

Peter Hayward: To use that knowledge, information, surprise, delight, shock to reflect on themselves and the world they're in. Is it meant to be this process of both learning, but also reflecting on self in situation?

Tina Auer: I think it can be used as a self reflection, but I would see a bit more inviting an audience to, to do interpretation of the stories. So the story world you are walking through and the physical narrative, like everything placed in there is. Staged on purpose, but nevertheless, as an audience member, you don't have to read the book from A to Z, you just have multiple entry points. And by allowing an audience to just start with the book, so to say at any point you also certainly offer the opportunity to an audience member to only go there what interests you the most or what you pay first attention to. And so again here it's the playfulness which correlates between the room and yourself in a way. And whatever story you come up with while detecting and walking through the whole space, it certainly, as an author, always have got some parts of him or herself while writing a story. Also, the Proto-detective, or the audience member, develops a certain part of biography while reading through the story staged in the room.

Tim Boykett: We had a lot of nice experiments that were able to do. We tried going through various genres, which was good. We made a crime story and we made a science story. We had a planned bank robbery, which was really good. We also got, we really managed to get some proper or some real [architectural] layout from a bank really just around the corner where we were setting up the environment. So people really could walk into the bank and get details of the architecture of the building and also know where where where places are, where you could get the money out of there. And so there's this over blending of the physical reality and the city we're in and the physical space that the installation is in with this sort of fictionalized story.

And this sort of, it's like semi adventure that's going on, like hearing people through a door or hearing people who are in the subterranean passages talking on the radio. And then all of a sudden they turn up and try to get out, but the doors being chained shut on them and things like that. So there's a bit of drama that we put in there. So we had a lot of fun building a bunch of those. Did various bits, but one of the most intense ones was perhaps the Mind the Map, which was about the migration situation that was happening in the Mediterranean. It has been over 10 years that we showed in Nantes and we showed fragments of it elsewhere.

So yes, it's been quite playful and also very serious from time to time. And then in about 10 years ago now, actually as part of a larger project, we were at an event organized by our colleagues FoAM in Brussels. And we were involved in a process of imagining what this project could lead to in the future. And it was a very short, maybe two hour long futuring process where as a group, we got guided through a critical uncertainties process that was gone through and creating four scenarios, little story worlds that could go on.

And that was this eye opening experience for us that the things that we've been doing, we never really talked about the future because the future is essentially unknowable. The future is open. We don't really know what's going to happen. People seem to have a bunch of ideas, whether it's Alvin Toffler's books or William Gibson books or whatever. There's smart people seem to think about it, but it was like, we can't do that. And it's all a bit nonsense, nonsensical, or it's all just technology propaganda. But we've been looking at this process and we realized just a minute, this is something that real people can do.

You don't need to be a hyper smarty person or have something you're trying to sell. It can just be a group of people who are interested, can think of multiple futures in parallel, go through a process and get somewhere that's interesting. And I think this gobsmacked us a little bit. That's all of a sudden threw open this door into futures practice and we found we'd arrived there.

Tina Auer: Yeah, then I think we started to allow ourselves, if we can stage those rooms those physical narratives in a present, why shouldn't we be able to also present and stage some possible futures and even maybe preferred futures and have them in parallel and overlay them? And I think all of a sudden we realized ourselves that we stumbled or tripped into something other people, Stuart Candy or Jake Dunagan call Experiential Futures. And I think it also took quite a while, quite some years ‘til we found this term and then felt all of a sudden comfortable or a bit like home in there.  I think the original question is who we are, then maybe we could end this question with we probably might be what Jose Ramos calls Mutant Futurists.

Tim Boykett: We didn't learn to be futurists. We were doing something else and we accidentally fell in a mud pile and came out covered in futurity or something. Ending up in this community has been really interesting because there are a whole bunch of thoughts that people have had and processes that have been developed and imaginations and being able to work out, okay, what can we learn from what can we bring to what are the unique points that we have as our strengths? How do we merge into this logic? And it's really quite interesting. And yeah, it's it's been a very exciting couple of years since then, going oh, there's always stuff to explore and new toys.

 

Peter Hayward: I'm really interested in what are the philosophies or approaches? You've already indicated, a joy and a creativity to create scenes with your practice, so to speak. What are the underpinning foundations of the work you now do?

Tina Auer: I think... Maybe we could have those practices we use... separated and summarized at once in probably two main directions or two main areas. There is what we already were mentioning this Experiential Futures, which we sketch, develop, implement together with many other people as well. And probably see this a bit as our artistic output, like inviting a broad audience to walk through there and be part of it and experience those futures as one sort of a method of practice.

And then a second one, most certainly, enriching and informing the other area or the other field, which we call Futuring Exercises. What can be defined, in a nutshell, as those workshops we do with an interested public and facilitate them through certain exercises during which we support them and inspire them to think out loud about possible futures, like workshops. Something in between 1, 2 or 3 hours to 5 days or something.

Tim Boykett: And to make those zwo things possible is a whole bunch of techniques. And this is maybe what you're aiming at here is what are the frameworks? What are the underpinnings that we often like use or to keep a large scale structure here? And one of them in terms of our, these futuring exercises is we rely very carefully or very heavily on the approaches summarized under the Art of Hosting. So this idea of that when we're inviting people to come and be part of a Futuring Exercise, we are hosting them in a number of different ways. So we're looking after them. We're caring for them. We're enabling them to play because if you're feeling exposed in some sense you're not going to play freely and be able to have a bunch of strange ideas.

So the Art of Hosting is about picking people up. Carrying them through this process, letting them feel comfortable, letting them feel open to a whole bunch of freedoms that they can have and discussions that they can have and leave that space in that time, feeling like they were, they did something that was unique. And this is also quite nice. We also try and do this in the Experiential Futures, of course, because when people come in there, they're also visitors to a space and we want them to feel like they're being hosted and they're able to explore that space. They're able to get quite close to things and be able to have imaginations about what's going on and to relax into the space to the point that people get lost in the in these physical these experiential futures and just spend minutes, quarters of an hour more than they plan to, which is quite nice. So this art of hosting is probably a very important approach.

Tina Auer: And since you mentioned the whole sort of playfulness, not sure whether that could be called a practice or a method, but in all of our ideas and approaches, it's the playfulness.

Which has got a very important standing because it doesn't matter whether during the workshops or also in the experiential futures, I think it's allowing or supporting people to not fear the future, I think it's also about developing some sort of a Lust auf Zukunft. It's a German expression here, a certain passion, a certain excitement towards futures instead of merely being completely paralyzed when thinking about it. And I think this is very important for us as well. Having that maybe even naive approach towards futures, allow visionary thinking, allow them to be stupid or to be ridiculous.

Because it is much more about the living with uncertainty instead of just planning the future. We don't know as Tim said in the beginning. We don't know what the future really carries in it and what really going to be happening, but preparing or developing this passion, this lust for whatever might come. We welcome it and we navigate towards it, or with it, and then see how we are dealing with the uncertainty.

Tim Boykett: Whenever this expression Lust auf Zukunft comes up, I just get “Lust for Life” [from The Stooges] in the back of my head.

Peter Hayward: I was going to, I just want to unpack a few phrases that recur in your work that are interesting phrases. So one I've heard a number of times, this notion of Thinking out Loud. So what is it about encouraging people to Think out Loud as opposed to just think?

Tina Auer: Thinking out Loud, especially in groups. Thinking out loud collectively. Discussing and getting into a dialogue what the future might be and through listening. Thinking about that and having also the other positions and other opinions. You all of a sudden might not be convinced or not necessarily try to convince others about your single vision of the future. All of a sudden, all those positions, ideas, visions are merging. And through this, we might get this diversity, which we also have in the present and then have this diverse possibilities for a future. And through this together as the group, which is talking to each other, we might then again feel the agency.

Okay this is a possible vision we have. How can we then make that more, I don't know, more real or how can we walk towards this preferred future instead of just, again, fearing it. Or just being completely by myself, having one single vision and it's frightening, therefore I just stick my head into the sand into the earth and not think about it anymore and just walk whatever comes and I ignore signals and trends, which if we think about it loud together, we might be able to deal with.

Tim Boykett: This is one of the reasons why this Thinking out Loud is when we think, we change our minds, but thinking out loud means it's able to change your mind with other people. I think all of us have had the experience of being in a group of people talking about something and there's someone who's got a vision and you just want to slap them on the back of the head and say, yes, thank you for sharing your, I don't know, flying taxis or whatever it is. What else do you want to think of? And this is why the Art of Hosting is a bit of a framework with which we work to get people to feel comfortable about saying things that they're not so sure about.

They're sure about thing one and thing two, but thing three and thing four are more open there may be more dreamy. There may be less well defined but only by thinking out loud and saying them out loud can all of a sudden someone go “I think I know what you mean.” Maybe that connects with this thing and then all of a sudden you get people sharing excitement about something. And when it really works, they get to a surprising new conclusion that neither of them could have got to themselves. This thinking out loud is about collectively getting further. I think there's this age old expression, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go in a group. This comes up often. And I think this idea of Thinking out Loud is very much about taking on that thinking out loud thinking as a group.

Peter Hayward: Thank you. Now, the second one I want you to expand on a bit and Tina's already hinted at it is another phrase. You say you go from Immersion via Agency to Engagement.

Tim Boykett: This expression arose last year. One of the ideas of it is by immersing ourselves in possible futures and thinking about them, whether it's in a future exercise environment by developing ideas, by actually having these experiences of possible futures. Walking into an installation or doing a like a prehearsal as FoAM talk about where you pretend something's real. You get a whole bunch of ideas about what could happen. This Immersion to Agency, for instance, and then one of the things is then going out and trying this out in smaller experiments.

So I think this allies closely with Jose Ramos's ideas of Anticipatory Experiments where it's about going out and trying things out in activist circles or in business-y things. What are the speculations that we have where we'd like to try something out and see whether it works? And if it's just an activist thing of going out and going to the Fridays for Future and talking about something out loud, how we think things could be and seeing how those things resonate. What was the third one again? I keep forgetting what the third one is to

Peter Hayward: Engagement.

Tim Boykett: Yes, of course, because once you actually get through that boundary of talking about it with people in a group or something to actually get engaged and like really make things change. So you might actually end up forming a new group of whether it's an activist group in your local area, or you might actually start set up a B-Corp to do the sort of things that you're interested in doing as a social business. You might set up a charity organization, et cetera, et cetera. There's this sort of three stages of going through things that we recognized. Whether it was in the Theory U plans and processes, or in a whole bunch of other processes that we were looking at for people imagining things and then turning their very open, dreamy, artsy ideas about possible futures into something that they actually wanted to engage with in the world.

Peter Hayward: Another phrase, and I just want to check whether it means anything slightly different to your earlier work, but this notion of Walk Through Futures.

Tina Auer: I think there is no real difference to what we had formerly when we had the physical narratives or also the media installations. The “walk through” I think is simply referring to the immersive environment. It is something where an audience is really, maybe even submerged or sucked into a world which allows them to be there and to pretend as if this either very future or this very crime story is happening in the very now.

Tim Boykett: So it's a bit of a dual thing to say the future artefacts that, say, Near Future Lab work a lot with or Extrapolation Factory or Stuart Candy. They're these objects that allow you to think about a possible future by picking up and holding an artefact from that future and maybe leafing through the book or playing with the interface or whatever it is, whatever that object does. That's something that sort of use around and it's in a gallery space or whatever other space and then the world emerges out of that. Whereas this sort of Walk Through Futures, this idea that we can actually use our entire bodies to experience the being in that space and the olfactory experience of being surrounded by it. The different heights of things, the way that we're actually embedded in something, and it surrounds us in such a way that it would not so easily to say that's not going to happen. Because it already is happening around me. I'm embedded in it and I can use all this sort of somatic intelligence to think about it. It's an incredibly hard thing to do. So you've got things like the Mission Biz did that wonderful theater [ZED TO] that went on over months about 10 years ago. Or you've got the Four Futures for Hawaii [from Jake Dunagan, Stuart Candy and Jim Dator] or Mitigation of Shock from Superflux, where you're inside this possible apartment. And you're surrounded by everything that's important in everyday life and a lot of our installations work with that way of trying to actually embed you in it so that your whole body can be part of your perception and your intelligence that you're using.

 

Peter Hayward: Thanks for explaining kind of your practice and where you do it. I'm interested in you as just, people in the world. What are the futures that are most energizing for you? Either they're getting attention because they excite you or they're getting an attention because they concern you.

Tina Auer: I think while focusing or while being excited about futures and working on them more, playing even with futures throughout those last couple of years. It feels a bit as if there is a rising, how to say, a rising awareness of an interconnectivity of signals. Or this is at least what I, or what we feel. There is a certain willingness to accept that there is not a single solution to all the crisis we are facing. And this willingness or this acceptance of there is just not an app. There is no app out there which is going to be helping us and making the world a better place. And we are not even actually knowing, or we do know there is no such a thing as a better world for all of us. We all have got different definitions of what might a better world be or looking like.

I think what seems to be very interesting or exciting and even keeping us up our feet is that there seems to be a certain tendency that people are willing to approach the crisis in a different way. In a more diverse way. And not just focusing on the solution either in a technological way or an economic idea of changing the world.

Tim Boykett: So there's this idea that people are prepared to accept that there are collapse like developments that are probably unavoidable but that doesn't mean that we're going to be ending up in [Cormac McCarthy’s] The Road or in some Mad Max scenario. But there is this possibility of an interweaving of utopian progressive developments that will help to mitigate the negative effects of these sort of dystopian collapse type developments.

And even some something like the [Jem Bendell’s] Deep Adaptation framework, which is about accepting that many things will change. What do we want to give up on, what we want to revive and how to live well in this sort of energy descent scenario to deal with what's going on. And for instance, one of the issues that then comes up there is, and once again, we're not talking about faint signals as things that are happening, but more faint signals as awarenesses that are slowly arising and becoming more there is this idea that things like inequalities, wealth gaps, health gaps will make these things worse.

And that there's something to be gained from a solidarity without wealth gaps and bringing that into a society to help us deal with the predicaments that we're in much better. So much so that a question that we got at an exhibition almost two years ago now, after presenting some of our work, someone stood up and very emotionally asked, “how dare you maintain visionary thinking in times like these?” They were quite upset that we would hold on to this possibility that things are not just going to get worse, but that maybe we have ways of thinking and developing and changing and making things less worse.

Peter Hayward: Yeah, that's interesting.

Tina Auer: This is what we see in terms of, I dunno, weak signals or something. That there is a certain degree of passion about visionarity. I think there are much more people out there who are, probably also because we are a bit more active in this field, sharing visions, which is quite lovely.

Peter Hayward: How do you tackle the communication question with people who don't know, don't understand what it is you do and the way you approach it?

Tim Boykett: One of the things that we start off with is this, as we talked about beforehand, this idea of visiting someone's office and creating a story where you can tell something about somebody. And people understand that quite often they find it creepy but it's a way of talking about the artistic practice of building these environments to explore ideas. And perhaps one of the things that emerged out of that was a discussion. Okay; the old work that we were doing, people were Proto-Scientists. Then they became Proto-Detectives in these physical narratives. So maybe in these experiential futures, people were Proto-Futurists. They're not real futurists with qualifications and degrees and things but they're Proto-Futurists. They're like trying out the idea of being a futurist for themselves and seeing what will go on.

Tina Auer: And if we don't want to call it proto-futurists we also can say that we are then to communicate what we are doing is actually, maybe similar to a sports coach. What we do is helping people to train their imagination. Yeah, it's a bit like, seeing imagination as a muscle. And if you don't use it, you lose it. And this is what very often happens. I'm just very glad sort of watching Tim's daughter in the very moment. And she's in this constant, “what if,” and “as if.” And it's just great seeing. And this is something we maybe try to train, or maybe try to offer as soon as we are approaching an audience. Either in the Futuring Exercises or the Experiential Futures to support this "what if" and "as if" thinking and being. Therefore, I even could try to explain to my grandmother or my mother saying I'm a sports coach.

Peter Hayward: Yes I did catch Tina's point that we don't necessarily use the future's muscle in order to plan the future. We actually use the future's muscle to become more creative and resilient in the face of the future.

Tim Boykett: Precisely. That's the sort of thing we'd like to hope for. And it's got a lot to do with acting. Having more of a beginner's mind or a child's mind. Tina said about watching our daughter just play with things is to just open. And we learn at some point in our lives, possibly as teenagers that making things up and being full of fantasy is socially difficult, even unacceptable. And you could even say that a lot of our work, even these immersive environments that we were building 20 years ago, were about encouraging Serious Black-Wearing Arts People to act like children. And to explore things and to be in their bodies and not just be in their minds. And it's very delightful to watch a bunch of quite serious people act foolishly in public. And they love it too. Until they remember that they're acting foolishly in public and then they get embarrassed. But it's okay. We've helped crack open that facade a little bit and hopefully improve their lives just a little bit for a moment.

Peter Hayward: Thank you. Let's wrap up on the book because it's through the book that I met you. You have just written and, or you have published a book that is called Futures Brought to Life. Do you want to talk about the book what it's for, who it's aimed at. It's an interesting book. In the future space, but I'll let you explain why.

Tim Boykett: perhaps one of the things that we first need to mention is the subtitle. The subtitle is "We are no futurists."

 It's probably a very like German grammar thing. We're just saying we're not trained futurists and most people aren't. We're just people who've slipped into this space and have found a whole bunch of delight in this space and valuable things that are worth doing. And wanted to share some of that. That enjoyment and those insights and the things that we've found it's almost like we've been roaming around inside this world and we found a couple of pretty stones that we'd like to put in a box and show to our friends. That's a part of what we're doing, but we've made a whole bunch of new friends.

So a big part of the book was contacting people like yourself and asking them a bunch of questions and two questions about how did they think about bringing futures to life and asking them about strategies for maintaining visionary futures thinking, because these are two of the biggest questions that we're dealing with and we think that the spectrum of answers that we received from people from like very serious futurists to people who were wondering why the hell we were asking [them] this question. Like saying, I've got nothing to do with futures. I just think in the future we should be nice to each other.

And that was really interesting. So this has been a very important part of the book and the process, and we think there's a lot to be gained through reading those things. And the other thing, maybe the audience that we're aiming for is people who, like us, have become aware that there is something called Futuring but don't quite know how to go about doing it. By sharing our experiences of what we do and how we found futures thinking emerging with it and maybe even sharing a lot of some of the techniques that we've found to be useful, it might make it easier for other people to say, Oh, I could do that too.

Like the Sniffing Glue magazine in 1970, that said, here's three guitar chords now go and start a band. This might be the equivalent of that okay, go and do some futuring. Here's some very simple fragments that you can put together which probably means that accomplished futurists might find it less valuable because it's maybe talking about a lot of things that they already know. On the other hand, we hope and we've got a little bit of feedback like this that people have said, Hey, look, this is just such a very different perspective on what futures work is that it actually offers a way for futurists to mutate themselves and to find some things perhaps outside what it is that they would normally do. And maybe have some different types of fun with what they do. Maybe.

Peter Hayward: You actually say some very important things that often I think in the more traditional literature, we don't say, so I'm going to pick up a couple of these and maybe you want to expand on. You say the Future is a Verb. You've actually got it in big letters, almost on the first page of the book.

Tina Auer: If you use future as a verb, it becomes something you can do. It includes activity. I am Futuring instead of the Future or even Futures, which always can be then categorized. It is something what is stable can be explained and is in a box while the verb, you do something is much more open to a flexible or malleable thing and output.

Tim Boykett: Yeah. I mentioned earlier this question of agency by the future being a verb. We're talking very much about not the Consumption of Future, but the Creation of Futures and that all of us have a role to play in creating the futures in our smaller community groups. Whether it's an arts group, families, extended families, friends, activist groups, whatever that is it's something that we can do. And it's forever changing. The future just keeps moving.

Peter Hayward: Another phrase you added, which I've not seen in a lot of books on futures, Futures Care.

Tim Boykett: There's probably a number of things that are floating around in here. One of them is this, with this Lust auf Zukunft expression from German, there's a lust for life thing. Is about caring about the futures, but also care in the sense of caring for something that's maybe weak at the moment. So whether it's a person who's ill or whatever other things, you've got a cat that's dying, it needs care. Caring for the futures is about looking after them, either where they're in the process of maybe dying, like giving up on this future, the future of the world is going to be a glorious place where we all live in. Western standards of living having steaks every second night, that future is dying and needs to be maybe a hospice or give them some palliative care. But also the futures that are being born need the care to help them grow and become something bigger and stronger. So there's two ideas of future care.

It also resonates strongly with one of the versions of the Permaculture ethics, which is about Future Care. Earth care, people care, and future care. We look after the Earth that looks after us, we look after other people, and we look after the future by not grabbing everything for ourselves now. So there's some ideas of what future care might be.

Peter Hayward: Thank you. I think you are downplaying the professionalism in the way that you've assembled a good literature around Experiential Futures, you talk about futures as a muscle and how you build the muscle in people. There's some quite detailed descriptions of the actual walkthrough futures and processes and installations that you've run. Do you want to just talk some more about, that information that you've made available to people who get the book?

Tim Boykett: Wow. Firstly, thank you for those very kind words.

Tina Auer: Thanks for that. I think the walk through futures, especially, we are working on this world of Turnton since I think almost seven or eight years and getting into more detail during this future part is just probably completely exploding our time here. Maybe a brave idea. The reason why we did the book is, I think, we have been walking into so many directions in terms of futures and future thinking, future studies even and we learned so much throughout those last years. I think it was also in a way a certain moment for us to sit down and to reflect and to bring into shape what has been either challenging, exciting, interesting for us throughout those years and bring it somehow a bit onto a single page. Even though the book has got more pages and just now also saying and appreciating all the help and all the ideas we've got, and maybe even stole from others in the community. And have that appreciation wrapped up in the very moment through the book and keep going and walk towards new or other futures from this very moment.

I don't know whether that makes sense now I think we can't elaborate on Turton in this very moment, which, for me, it's an overwhelming question. It's eight years, eight years of development and implementation work. Especially, for example, right in the beginning right now, behind us, there is the next step of developments within Turnton with for this walkthrough futures. We're going to be opening an exhibition in  a week or two. Traveling in the year 2047, aiming at six to 12 year old kids. This is just such an also exciting and challenging next step. After the book has been published, for example, it just doesn't stop. As Tim said before, the future of futures, yeah, constantly changing and in movement.

Tim Boykett: It's a very exciting sort of process and being able to take the time to write all this down was very interesting to reflect on it and to then reflect upon those reflections and then throw away all the reflections to start again. And there are tendrils that go back. So there was a book that we did almost 10 years ago called Physical and Alternate Reality Narratives with a bunch of collaborators. And we went back and revisited a lot of the reflections that we had from then to remind us of what we'd learned then that helped us to make this sort of physical narratives and immersive experiential futures work so much so that people have actually asked us to write this down and we've tried in various times to write things down.

Maybe one of the reasons why we weren't able to do it before now was because there is a lot of elements in there that are hard to explain to people, but maybe this has been the right sort of context, but we've had enough time now enough experience to be able to summarize it in a way that's hopefully intelligible. Maybe we'll find a bunch of other people creating wonderful immersive experiences of possible futures that we can wander through.

Peter Hayward: You asked people like me and a very interesting group of people, you asked them two questions. How can one bring futures to life and which strategies do you recommend for maintaining visionary futures thinking? What's your sense of what you got from that last chapter of the book?

Tim Boykett: Yes, there was a lot of pleasant surprises or details like we contacted people because we're pretty sure they're going to be able to say something interesting and we knew their work. But nevertheless we were surprised by a lot of people, what they said. And some of them were very flippant comments that were quite insightful. And some of them were long and detailed ones.

Tina Auer: And I think it's probably not a single answer, which is sticking out, so to say, but again, it's the mixture of all of them. Which gave us again how to say a certain safety in, there are so many people out there, so many people we either already have been knowing before and working together with them or meeting through, asking those questions which just convinces us or makes us comfortable again to keep going in this direction and really stay with the idea of visionary future thinking.

Peter Hayward: I'm curious about what you might have observed in regards the generational difference of the people who engage with your work and with your installations, because there's an aspect, I think Tim talked about this, is that there people who are caring for ideas about futures that they may have once thought were Possible, Preferable that are possibly leaving or possibly departing the world. And then there are people who are just born into the world the way the world is.

Tim Boykett: Much of it's a generational thing because but maybe there are a lot of Old Souls in the bad sense, people who are young physically, just holding on to the way they think the world needs to be, not open for change and a lot of very Young Souls, even in older bodies, who we've seen be very open to talking about and exploring ideas and to have this sort of joyful exploration of futures. As the parable says that the true optimist or the visionary is the person who plants a tree they'll never sit underneath a certain degree of maybe it's not generational, but there's an attitudinal thing about being young and enthusiastic that we've noticed.

Tina Auer: And I think another thing maybe we noticed is that again, it's not about generations, but it also has to do with, how to call it, maybe an economic or a social background. There was one workshop we were running with Roma people in Romania. And it was the very first time that I realized that there are so many people out there who don't see that they would have a future and in their eyes, they just can't think beyond today after tomorrow.

And so for me, it was a moment where I realized the privilege of being able to think and to shape or to think about futures. And this even was inspiring quite a lot. Enriching also our workshop processes in a way that we started to think about dreams and wishes and hopes much more and integrate that into the process design of futuring exercises. Because it's so much easier to start with thinking about the wishes and the dreams, sort of, go to future thinking. So you need, again here, I think it's a playfulness or it's a low threshold in a way, even without using the wrong words here, hopefully, but yeah, the not necessarily the generations. I think we do have got different approaches. It has got so many other aspects which are important and allowing people to think about futures and not allowing them.

Peter Hayward: Thanks. That's a lovely answer to finish on. Thanks Tina and Tim for taking some time out to spend some time with the FuturePod community. Congratulations on the book. It's eight years in the making. It's a very generous contribution to our community. So thank you for that.

Tim Boykett: Thank you very much. Thank you for having us.

Tina Auer: Thank you for saying this at the end. Thanks Peter. Great being here.

Tim Boykett: And we look forward to carrying on being part of the community and lots of interesting discussions into the future.

Peter Hayward: This was a rich, joyous, and highly generative journey through Tim and Tina's experiences from immersive art to visionary futures. I encourage you to have a look at their book. Futures Brought to Life (we are not futurists) and steal back the ideas they stole in turn. Future pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod please check out our Patreon link on the website. I'm Peter Hayward thanks for joining us today.